Now they're REALLY taking the p***: urinating model is shortlisted for Turner Prize

Now they're REALLY taking the p***: urinating model is shortlisted for Turner Prize

Now they're REALLY taking the p***: urinating model is shortlisted for Turner Prize

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Taking the piss? David Shrigley's urinating model

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The Turner Prize has spent years convincing art world sceptics that it isn’t taking the mickey - only to have a major exhibit this year that is definitely taking the pee.

The centrepiece of artist David Shrigley’s prize show is a seven-foot animatronic life model which urinates into a bucket at every 16 blinks of its over-sized eyes.

Visitors to the show, which is taking place in Londonderry, the UK City of Culture, will be invited to try their hand at drawing the model which curator Maoliosa Boyle hails as showing “a tongue-in-cheek resemblance to Michelangelo’s David”.

Shrigley, 45, who lives in Glasgow, has previously directed music videos for Blur and is known for darkly witty cartoons and was here inspired by the tradition of learning to draw formally. “Drawing is at the centre of what I do.”

But as the public’s sketches are also displayed, it makes any visitor a potential Turner Prize exhibitor. “What I’m really interested in is that everyone can participate and be a part of this artwork,” he said.

He is one of four contenders for the £25,000 prize to be awarded on December 2.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, 35, who was born in London of Ghanaian descent, presents her large-scale paintings of imagined black subjects in a hauntingly-lit gallery. “They are black but they’re also superhuman,” the first black woman to make the shortlist said.

French artist Laure Prouvost, also 35 and living in London, develops the absurd and subversive work for which she was nominated in which she invented a fictional grandfather who was friends with the real artist Kurt Schwitters.

A film recounts the grandfather’s disappearance, possibly down a hole he has been digging for years, his room left strewn with eccentric teapots and cups as if at some Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.

Alice-like, visitors then duck through a hole in the wall to view a new film of her fictional grandmother’s dreams, all told in Prouvost’s accented English.

Finally Tino Sehgal, 37, the London-born, Berlin-based artist shortlisted for an interactive performance in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, presents an early work, This is exchange, 2003.

A team of 11 local recruits make visitors “an offer” – if they fully engage in conversation about the market economy, they might earn £2, funded from the budget for the City of Culture programme.

The Turner Prize exhibition at Ebrington, a converted former military barracks, opens tomorrow [oct 23] and runs until January 5, admission free.